Archive for the 'market totalitarianism' Category
Tuesday, December 6th, 2011
Strangling Public Enterprise
For those interested in the story of how the overclass suppresses not-for-profit public enterprise, the latest edition of Bloomberg Business Week carries a must-read.
Funny, isn’t it — the extravagant tricks required to preempt something that’s supposedly stillborn and/or self-destroying and/or a road to serfdom, if not simply impossible?
One might also wonder if the case of the model telecom legislation pushed by the American Legislative Exchange Council will also be taught as part of another of ALEC’s efforts — an attempt, on behalf of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, to plant state laws “requiring that all high school students take a class in ‘free enterprise’ as a condition of graduation.”
Monday, November 21st, 2011
Tis the Season 2011
This stuff pretty much speaks for itself. In a piece titled “What Brand Marketers Want From Facebook: A Holiday Wish List,” Laura O’Shaughnessey, CEO of SocialCode, a social agency that works with Fortune 100 brands and top agencies, has posted a true gem of humanity over on Advertising Age. Here you go:
Facebook is notorious for constantly evolving its platform, both for users and advertisers.
It is about that time of year and the signs are all around: stores are filled with festive decorations in hopes of enticing early shoppers, every commercial announces the perfect gift for him or her, and the Starbucks red cups have finally made their annual appearance. Yes, it is time to pull together our holiday wish lists. But it’s is not just you and me making lists; top brand and agency marketers are dreaming of what Facebook might give them this holiday season.
Among dear Laura’s wishes:
Third-party tracking within social ads.
Agency and brand marketers are also accustomed to including their own tracking urls within display advertising. While this is possible within certain Facebook marketplace ads, whenever a brand wants to use an ad with ‘social context’ (e.g. embedded like/share/read/listen button or sponsored story ad), they forego the ability to include third party tracking.
Obviously there are great benefits to running the ads with social context. They tend to be a highly efficient way of garnering ‘likes’ or desired actions since the user can engage directly within the ad unit. These ad units are also more relevant to users since they incorporate behaviors of users’ friends and provide a positive word of mouth experience.
On the flip side, the inability to include third party tracking makes it more difficult for brands to track downstream actions of these users. Perhaps Facebook will consider allowing a hybrid that serves the dual purpose of keeping users within the Facebook platform, but allowing brands to track their other activities on the brand page.
As heart-rending as Tiny Tim, isn’t it? Who among us hasn’t shed tears over corporate capitalists’ still-limited ability to track people’s downstream actions?
Not to worry, though, friends. Facebook, Ms. O’Shaughnessey reminds us, is certainly no Scrooge to its own true constituency:
Facebook is the world’s most pervasive social network and has a constantly improving advertising platform. Although the metrics and analytics are not totally comprehensive, and not an exact replica of display advertising, the power of social ads, the incredible targeting and the reach of the platform means that marketing on Facebook should be a crucial part of every brand manager’s marketing mix. As Facebook continues to innovate, marketers will certainly get some of the capabilities they long for and will continue to get new functionality that ties into the social graph [sic + wtf? + predictable explanation] and enables the most powerful advertising online.
Monday, March 28th, 2011
Now, This Makes Sense
It’s about damned time! Finally, marketing is reaching into our glorious world-leading prison system! And this, God’s chosen country with its obviously best of all possible socio-economic systems, simply cannot afford to miss out on all those opportunities to build brand-consciousness.
Wednesday, December 8th, 2010
Cartoon of the Day
Mike Flugennock‘s latest cartoon on Obama and the Democratic Wing of the Business Party.
Thursday, November 4th, 2010
Testing the Market Totalitarianism Thesis
Market totalitarianism is the creeping advancement of corporate capitalist control over all the details of modern life, in and across its three major spheres — work, politics, and personal life.
If you doubt this phenomenon is real, consider this fact, as mentioned, all the way from Australia, by TCT commenter Luis Cayetano: In May of 1958, Erich Fromm was interviewed at length on commercial television in the United States.
52 years later, that same thing is so far from being possible, it is almost unimaginable. Picture 60 Minutes, for example, devoting not just one but two segments (see the run-time of the Wallace interview of Fromm) to letting, say, Noam Chomsky explain his present view of the society and the world.
No fucking way that happens now, obviously. Sponsors these days, having grown all the more powerful and having learned well the dangers of unpoliced television, would never permit it, and the producers and reporters, knowing that, would never in a million years propose it.
Monday, October 25th, 2010
The Capitalist Road
China’s Stalinist capitalists continue to pitch the idea that they are presiding over an “ongoing socialist modernization drive,” that the whole shebang is merely an effort to accumulate the wealth needed to eventually make China into a worker’s paradise. 
I might entertain the possibility that this claim is anything but a smokescreen, were it not for news like this:
Explosive growth of corporate marketing is a hallmark of and a vehicle for market totalitarianism/capitalist dictatorship. It is a technology that inherently stymies the communication habits and conditions required for creating democracy, socialism, and, ultimately, human survival.
Of course, so does cars-first transportation.
China’s biz-suited big boys (see any girls there?) also like that Earth-killing corporate capitalist industry quite a lot. With all the predictable effects:
